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In IT circles, the term "disintermediation" usually means removing the middleman—the dealer or wholesaler—from the distribution chain, thanks mostly to e-commerce. When Daniel Loranger uses it, he's talking about changes that have removed the middleman standing between users and the information they seek.

The price of software has risen dramatically, especially for large systems. Today, software costs can quickly consume the average IT budget. That's why increasing numbers of organizations are turning to Software Asset Management (SAM) to help manage and control their software costs. Yet according to IDC, less than half of 250 companies it recently surveyed actively practice asset management.

If history is any indication, the battle for dominance in the Web services space won't hinge upon the overall efficacy of a vendor's advertising hype. Rather, a Web services champion will be determinedby the degree to which they can court the support of enterprise software developers and independent software vendors.

So it was a month or so ago that I first caught wind of this new Eclipse project. A colleague of mine shouted over to me, “Hey Matt, did you see the thing about IBM donating $40 million in software to a new open-source developer platform?” No, I said, could you forward it to me? And it was on…

When people think about the security of Web Services, they naturally worry about two things: the security of the XML documents as they are being transported over the Internet; and the security of the XML documents while they are being used at a server or client.

No matter how solid the disaster recovery plan your company had in place prior to Sept. 11, you've almost certainly revisited it since then. What will be disheartening is if, having done that, your company then decides that no further action is warranted. Might that happen?